In the field of animal control, a well-known type of bird trap, e.g. for capturing pigeons or other nuisance birds, features a caged enclosure with an access opening at one end thereof, at which a simple one-way gate mechanism is employed to allow birds to gain entry to the interior space of the enclosure, but preventing opening of the gate in the reverse direction from the inside the enclosure. The gate is basically made up of a plurality of tines that hang downwardly from a cross-bar spanning across the access opening near the top edge thereof. The tines have a length that slightly exceeds the height of the access opening, and their bottom ends reside on the interior side of the access opening. A bottom cross-member of a frame of the access opening thus blocks each tine from swinging outwardly through the access opening to the exterior of the enclosure, while the open interior space of the enclosure allows free swinging of the tines upwardly into the interior space of the enclosure. Accordingly, at least some of the tines hanging from the cross-bar will swing upward into their open positions when a bird walks through the opening in an attempt to access the bait set inside the trap, but once the bird has fully crossed through the access opening, the tines are gravitationally returned to their normal closed positions hanging over the access way. The tines cannot be opened in the reverse direction by application of force outwardly against them by the bird that is now securely trapped within the enclosure.
It would be desirable to improve on these bird traps by increase the rate of successful captures. It is known in the art that while a baited trap is often effective to attract the target bird into close proximity to the access opening, some of these attracted birds stop short of gaining full entry to the enclosure, and thus are not successfully trapped.